While it won't crack the top 10 ranks of the TOP500 anytime soon, the powerful supercomputer is expected to be put to use providing more accurate weather forecast, designing drugs, and designing better body armor.

UF immunologist David Ostrov comments, "HiPerGator can help get drugs get from the computer to the clinic more quickly. We want to discover and deliver safe, effective therapies that protect or restore people’s health as soon as we can. UF’s supercomputer will allow me to spend my time on research instead of computing."

HiPerGator uses AMD Opteron CPU cores. [Image Source: AMD]

The university will share its new computing wealth with joint projects with other top institutions around the country.

Depends in the workload. GPUs can not do everything. This machine will need to run almost anything with out a fuss. Depending on the Dell chassis used they might be able to drop in some cards at a later date. That would require more money, power, and cooling.

Actually given the stated data types this thing will be fed, GPUs are actually far better if things like Folding@Home are any indication. Drug research and body armor research sound like similar types of data.

You still need CPUs to run the operating system and manage dataflow to the GPUs. That said, the supercomputer was subject to a budget so using cheaper CPUs and off the shelf hardware would be cheaper than a custom design stuffed with GPUs. You also need personnel with decent training to code for GPUs. Using a CPU cluster lowers the barrier to entry.

All the major server vendors - IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. - have off-the-shelf servers that can be stuffed with GPUs. Plus, there are lots of people who can write decent code for GPUs, especially in the research community and among graduate students. In fact, if a university cannot find people willing (to learn) to use the latest technology, they shouldn't be building a supercomputer (using old technology) in the first place. As for being within budget, they could have opted for a system with far fewer CPUs and smaller operating costs (due to lower power usage, for example), and still end up with higher performance than the system they got.